Topic: javascript

I started a new project just for kicks: the Birdmanizer. It is a tool which loads any website and animates it into your browser view using the "cinema newspaper" (or perhaps "spinning vinyl") style CSS effect I mentioned in my earlier blog post on CSS Transforms. I was inspired by the cut scenes in the original Batman TV series, as well as the cut scenes from the Harvey Birdman cartoon series — where the project gets its name and audio clip.

This tool will transform any website into an animated cut scene inspired by the original Batman TV series and the Harvey Birdman cartoon series. WebKit/Safari browsers only for now — it is a work in progress.

WebKit based browsers like Safari have had CSS Transforms for quite awhile now, allowing developers to skew, translate, rotate, and scale HTML elements or the entire page with CSS alone. The Firefox 3.1 betas also now have CSS transformations. These CSS properties can also be animated with JavaScript, although finding documentation for how to do it in Firefox 3.1 was a bit of a hassle. Let me show you how it is done.

When it comes to picking a width for my web designs, what I really want to know are the common browser window dimensions for a visitor. Google Analytics tracks screen resolution, but this is increasingly meaningless with the rising popularity of super high resolution wide screen monitors. Most websites these days are 1024 pixels wide or less, thus my browser window is generally about 1000 pixels wide. Every so often I visit a website that is setup for a 1280 pixel wide screen, and even though my widescreen monitor is much higher resolution than this, it really annoys me to resize my browser window. I don't want to hassle my visitors by being the only website they visit that forces them to resize. I will show you how to track the browser window dimensions (actually, the inner window viewport dimensions) for your visitors in Google Analytics. Update: Thanks to Paul for giving me a kick in the rear to fix a bug with listening to resize events.

I felt like I should do something fun with the zachstronaut Error 404 page. Doing something witty with your error pages (specifically 404) is a fine, long running tradition on the internets. I was reading Wikipedia pages about celestial objects and sifting through the NASA site for inspiration when I got bored and decided to play some Super Mario Bros. It was after beating World 1-4 that I had that "eureka!" moment.